Saurabh Sugandh 
Do you know that we, humans, have a longer survival rate if we develop a true emotional and longer relationship? There’s research available that supports this fact. It’s been revealed that in order to increase your lifespan, your relationships would help you better than your genes. This very fact is the basis for several mainstream dating applications and matchmaking websites. Their business model can be debatable as the algorithms used to match you with one another is the same used in a Chess game. The ELO algorithm not only reduces your chances to find a match but also decreases your probability in due course if you get rejected by a few. But, this is limited to the mainstream dating and matchmaking applications such as Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and so on. This you can still bypass using a premium account. See making money out of a social norm is nothing new. Most businesses do that and fall into the category of a service provider. But, it becomes dangerous when the means to an end can’t be justified.
There’s an interesting but dark story to tell. Be prepared to understand yet another version of the aftermath of the war economics. We all know that a sustainable war is crucial to create an arms and weapons market and bigger economies that deal in it are the ones who actually create them. When a long term war is fought, it impacts the population and later governs the movement of people. The governments that force its people to fight are the worst ones. You can understand this even in the current context of east versus west. The reason is that when you bring countries to a war, you also displace a lot of families. A lot of family members are unnecessarily forced to fight the battle. Their affected families either choose the route of immigration or end up taking up menial jobs such as cleaning and hard work. While this is still okay, the disturbing part is when they end up at the bloody hands of immigration brokers that lead them to one or more forms of prostitution. And, in the digital age, we are referring to them as webcam modeling. Unfortunately, these are too loosely classified as dating platforms. And, you might have been lured into some at least once in your internet browsing life.
This is not an exaggeration and you shouldn’t be surprised to know that there’s a very thin line of distinction between modeling and prostitution. In fact, to understand it better, you should consider one that creates the supply and another that maintains its demand. Nonetheless, the business model is exploitative in nature. Even in webcam chats, you won’t get a match unless you buy their premium services. This is usually associated with credits or minutes. The catch is that men have no control over it as these are the actual clients for them while the females have access to men’s credits or minutes. Mainly, as a man you get a request or acceptance based on your balance. And, the moment you enter the live feed, the models on the other end would try to squeeze your credits or minutes by either involving you in long chats or teasing you in one way or the other to keep you interested. Some even claim that the models earn a good amount of money on these platforms. And, it does certainly appear safer than physical prostitution but the concern is about the supply market.
The bizarre thing to note down is while the clients on these platforms can be from any part of the world, the models are mainly from weaker economies such as parts of eastern Europe, South Asia, Africa, or South America where internal conflicts or wars are a norm. And the victims from these countries fall prey to these underground online dating platforms. This is probably war economics 102.
So, the next time you have an urge to dive in, you better consider the responsible choice that you have. If you choose to discourage the market, you’re actually helping them to come out of it and at the same time discouraging the prolonged regional conflicts that the bigger economies tend to push you to. It’s your answer to them!
FVEY or The Highway!